Available From UC Press

The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism.
 
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment’s purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students’ eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work?
 
Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott’s jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town’s children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America’s reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the “Mother of Diversity Training,” who was driven against all odds to succeed.

Stephen G. Bloom is an award-winning journalist and author of five nonfiction books: The Audacity of Inez Burns, Tears of Mermaids, The Oxford Project, Inside the Writer’s Mind, and Postville. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa.

"Stephen G. Bloom deftly narrates and analyzes a complex story. The reader is hooked from the start. I kept thinking this would make a great movie."—Kathryn Olmsted, author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism 

"This book is a vital record, part of a mosaic of analysis on racial attitudes in post mid-century America and how to address racism in the era Jane Elliott was in her zenith. It's important for many reasons, but doubly more so now in the era of BLM. Bloom brings this story forward and makes it essential reading for today."—Dale Maharidge, author of Pulitzer Prize–winning And Their Children after Them

"Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a great story, brilliantly told. But more than that, it is just what the subtitle advertises––a cautionary tale of race and brutality. For many, Jane Elliott is a hero. But, she and her legendary experiment are much more complicated than the celebratory lore would have us believe. Set aside what you think you know about racism, power, and privilege; forget what you may have heard about Elliott. Read this book and you will understand them in a way you never did before."—Joseph Margulies, Professor of Law and Government, Cornell University   

"Bloom delivers a compelling and cautionary tale of how Jane Elliott's eye experiment, with all white people, turned her into the foremother of today's puzzling "diversity training" industry. He takes us to Riceville and the world of classroom no. 10 to uncover the person behind the looming well-manicured persona by talking to the children, neighbors, and teachers who were all affected at different distances by Elliott's audacious and some say exploitative work. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a gripping story of love, betrayal, social justice, and personal ambition, a celebration of tradition and intolerance of difference wrapped up in one woman's bullheaded drive to make America confront its own racism but on her own terms. This is a book Elliot once commissioned and then soundly denounced, perhaps the best kind of endorsement."–– Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities